The Rose

by Tiffany Reisz

  “And Ratty and Mole are overwhelmed by wonder and love,” August said.

  “Yes, right.” She smiled like a child. “That’s my favorite part, too. I could recite the whole passage, I’ve read it so many times.”

  “Surely not,” he said, a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. He was teasing her, she knew it, but she didn’t care anymore. He’d knocked her guards down with one little gift. Without her meaning to do it, the words of her most precious story tumbled out.

  “‘He looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper,’” Lia recited, “‘saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners...’”

  Lia paused and flipped open the book to the exact page, handed it to him so he could read along and see that she didn’t miss a single word.

  “‘All this he saw,’” she continued, “‘for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.’

  “‘“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”’

  “‘“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—”’”

  “‘“O, Mole, I am afraid!”’” August finished as he closed the book with a gentle thud and passed it back to Lia. She took it carefully from him and held it to her chest. Then he raised a hand to her face and, with a flick of his thumb, wiped a tear off the arch of her cheek.

  “I stand corrected. You know your Willows.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. She put the book back into the tissue paper and hid it away in the box like she did with so many of the things that brought tears to her eyes. “Daddy used to read that book to me every night. Every summer day when I was little, we’d walk in the woods, looking for Pan’s Island.”

  “Did you find it?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “But finding it wasn’t so much the point as looking for it with Daddy.” She laughed to stop herself from shedding another tear. “Anyway, if I’d found it I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be there.”

  “You’ll find it someday.”

  She wasn’t sure why, but when he said that, she almost believed him. Must have been his Greek accent.

  “Thank you very much,” Lia said. She was determined to take control of this conversation again. “This was very kind of you, Mr. Bowman.” He arched his eyebrow. “Sorry, August.”

  He looked to the left, looked to the right. He crooked two fingers at her, beckoning her to step forward to hear a secret. She leaned in so close she could have kissed him. He bent his head and put his lips to her ear.

  “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” he said. She wasn’t sure what it meant but it made her knees weak to hear it, and her thighs weren’t holding up all that well, either.

  “Um...my Latin’s a little rusty,” she said, meeting his eyes, the wild color of storm clouds.

  He put his hand to his mouth as if to tell her a secret.

  “Beware Greeks bearing gifts,” he said. His breath tickled the sensitive skin of her shoulder.

  Lia raised a finger and wagged it at his face.

  “You’re trouble.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.

  “I’m going now. Thank you for the gift. Flirting over.”

  Lia couldn’t believe she’d cried in front of the man. It had been years since she’d shed a single tear over anyone or anything. She’d forgotten how much she hated being vulnerable in front of someone. Thanks to August Bowman, she remembered.

  Wanting to put distance between them quickly, Lia strode across the hallway, stepped into the music room and stopped dead in her tracks.

  Across the room, at the fireplace, stood her mother with a man Lia had not seen in four years and had hoped to never, ever see again. The second he saw her, he smiled and raised his glass of red wine to her in a mocking toast.

  David.

  Here it was. This. The thing she’d been dreading. The knot in her stomach. The hand wrapped around her heart. She’d been right. Something monumentally bad had happened tonight, was happening right that second.

  David Bell was here, in her home.

  Her mother spotted Lia at the same instant and waved her over.

  “Lia? Are you all right?” August suddenly stood at her side.

  She was too scared to lie. “No.” Her breathing was so fast she thought she might faint. “Help me. Please?”

  As if answering her “please,” the house reverberated with a clap of thunder. The windows turned white as lightning split apart the sky.

  The power went out and they were all plunged into darkness.

  “I wish I could take the credit,” August said. “But that wasn’t me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lia felt a strong arm around her waist. She let August pull her from the room and down the hall. He took out his phone, turned on its torchlight and led her away.

  “Your room’s upstairs?” he asked.

  Lia nodded. They took the stairs quickly, despite the dark and the chaos in the house as the hundred guests laughed nervously and fumbled around for phones and candles and torches.

  “Left,” Lia said as they reached the top of the staircase. He half pulled, half carried her down the long hallway. “Here.”

  They’d reached her suite. Lia was still shaking when August opened the door and led her inside. He put her on the love seat in her sitting room.

  “We need wine and candles,” he said. “What would you like first?”

  “Candles in the box on the mantel,” she said, hoping that was true. Her suite included a sitting room with a large stone fireplace, only decorative these days, and her bedroom with a smaller working fireplace. She’d prefer to keep August out of her bedroom. August went to the sitting room fireplace and, by the light of his phone, found the candles, candlesticks and matches.

  “Are you going to tell me who that man was downstairs?” Quickly he lit four candles and set them around the room—two on the stone mantel, one on her side table by the love seat, one on her sewing table by her weaving loom.

  “Just an ex,” she said.

  “Ex what? Ex-con?” he asked. “You’re terrified of him, I can tell.”

  Lia stood up and took a candle from her mantel. By the light of it, she pulled two wineglasses from her cabinet and a bottle of Syrah from the wine rack.

  “Not terrified. I just... I didn’t want to talk to him. He’s not a nice person.”

  Understatement of the century.

  Flustered, Lia broke the cork off when twisting in the screw. The corkscrew landed with a metallic clatter onto the table.

  “Damn.” Lia put her hands over her face and breathed. She faked a smile, dropped her hands, muttered a “Sorry.”

  “Let me help you.” August walked to her and picked up the wine bottle, examining the broken cork as Lia rubbed her forehead. He slapped the base of it once, twice, three times with the palm of his hand. The broken cork wriggled its way to the top of the bottle and, with his fingertips, August pulled it out.

  “Voilà,” he said.

  Lia stared at him, wide-eyed. “How did you do that?”

  He raised his right hand. “It’s my spanking hand.”

  Lia shook her head as she poured the wine. If mischief were a kingdom, this man would be the prince of it.

  “Who is he?” August asked. “Really?”

  “His name is David,” Lia said softly. “A few years ago we spent the night together. I was serious about him. He wasn’t about me, apparently. Next day—literally the next day, he slept with someone else. He’s a bit older than I am. My parents have no idea
we were involved. They don’t know some of the things I know about him. Seeing him out of the blue tonight with my mother was...a bad surprise.”

  A very bad surprise. The worst of all surprises. But she couldn’t and wouldn’t go into that. David was a wound far too tender to touch.

  “Do you want me to toss him out of the house?” August asked.

  Lia was so shocked by that question that she laughed.

  “What? Why would you toss him out of my house? You don’t know him.”

  “Because he hurt you,” he said. “And that’s all the reason I need.”

  “You don’t know me, either,” she said.

  “But I’d like to.” He raised his wineglass to his lips. In the flickering candlelight, his fingertips looked dipped in gold.

  Lia wanted to say something to him, something like I’d like to know you, too. But that would be stupid, and Lia didn’t say stupid things to men anymore.

  Instead she said, “I need more wine.”

  She turned away from him to top off her glass. When she turned back, she found he’d taken the cover off her loom and was examining her tapestry.

  “I keep that covered for a reason,” she said as she came to stand by him. The reason was Gogo’s wiry hairs. And embarrassment.

  “Lia,” August breathed her name, “your work is magnificent.”

  She blushed in the dark. “Thank you. Still learning.”

  She’d woven the ocean, the dark red evening ocean, from one corner of the fabric to the top edge. A shadow lurked near the right center. The candlelight fluttered across the surface of her tapestry and tricked her eye into seeing the wine-dark ocean moving in flickering waves.

  “This is Andromeda and Perseus,” August said. “Yes?”

  “How did you know that? I haven’t put in Perseus yet. Or his Pegasus.”

  “I know my mythology,” he said. “This is Cetus, yes? The shadow? The monster about to emerge.” He pointed at the shape lurking in the red water. “But where’s Andromeda, the teenage maiden being sacrificed to Zeus’s sea monster?”

  “That would be me,” Lia said. “Or you. The viewer.”

  “This is what Andromeda sees?” August waved his hand over the tapestry, the red evening sea, the shadow in the water about to rise and devour her.

  “I wanted to weave the scene through her eyes, what she saw as she was waiting to be killed. Hope I got it right.”

  “Let’s find out,” he said. “May I?” He raised his hands and Lia put hers into them without thinking. Or...without thinking anything except that she wanted to put her hands in his.

  August pulled her closer, moving her to stand directly in front of him. From behind her, he clasped her wrists.

  “You are now Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, the king of Aethiopia, who dotes upon his daughter and Queen Cassiopeia, who like so many mothers in mythology was jealous of her daughter’s beauty.”

  August lifted her arms up and over her head. He held both her wrists in his one large, strong hand. They rested lightly in his grip, and she knew she could pull them away in an instant.

  She didn’t.

  “You are Andromeda,” he said again. “And your hands are chained over your head with another chain wrapped around your stomach.” He wrapped his arm around her hips and pulled her back against him. “Tightly. You can’t move at all.”

  “At all?”

  “No,” he said into her ear. “This was done at your request, Andromeda. Remember? Long or loose chains meant you could possibly cower when the Cetus came for you. And you will not cower in death but stand up straight and meet it face-to-face. You ordered your mother to lock the final chain to the rock.”

  “Why did I do that?” Lia asked, her voice low and breathless, her wrists still held in his hand, above her head. His voice was deep and low and rumbled like a gentle earthquake. He became a different person to her as he told the story, like an ancient bard, singing his tales at the feasts of long-dead kings.

  “The priests at the temple said you must be chained naked to the rock to await the ravaging of Cetus. It was to be your wedding night, and you would be married to Death. Your death alone would appease the wrath of Poseidon.”

  “Yes, in all art, she’s naked,” Lia said. “Thought that was because the artists were perverts.”

  “You poor girl, Andromeda. You wanted your mother’s arms, your mother’s protection and love. But you also wanted to punish your mother, as well. It was your mother’s fault you had to be sacrificed.”

  “Was it her fault?” Lia asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Queen Cassiopeia had bragged about you, saying her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids, the water nymphs who served in Poseidon’s temple. I say bragged, but in truth she lamented. Once she’d been the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, and then you usurped her. While chained to that rock, did you think perhaps your mother hadn’t secretly hoped this would happen? After all, once you were dead and gone, perhaps she would be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom again. ‘Look well, Mother,’ you said to her. ‘Look well at your child. Am I beautiful now, in these chains? Is this the marriage you arranged for me? Your daughter wed to Death? Will you brag that you’re the most beautiful woman in Father’s kingdom when I’m gone? Was that your plan all along?’”

  Lia could hear the girl’s voice ringing in her ears. She could hear the hiss and rasp of her fury and her fear.

  “How do you know all this?” Lia asked. “I read everything I could on Andromeda before I started the tapestry. I never read she made her mother chain her, or what she said to her.”

  “I’m Greek. You weave these stories into your tapestries with wood and thread. We are born with them carved onto our very bones, like scrimshaw. I know them as I know my own name. And yours, Lia.”

  Lia had never been more aware of her body and her breathing than she was then, wrists in his hands, back to his chest, lips panting, knees trembling, stomach quivering, her breasts pressed hard against the fabric of her dress. She knew if she could touch herself inside, she would be wet.

  “But where is handsome Perseus in your tapestry?” August whispered the words into her ear. “Where is his winged horse and our hero come to save you, Andromeda?”

  “He’s coming,” Lia said. “But not yet. I’ll weave him in last. I wanted Andromeda to wait, to be afraid, to believe no one is coming for her, that no one is going to save me. I mean, save her.”

  “Cruel,” he said. “You have a pagan soul, my lady.”

  “That’s not—”

  August laughed. She felt his chest move against her back. “Mercy is one of the Christian virtues, and I am no Christian, either.” The arm around her stomach tightened as he molded her body to his. Lia shuddered, shocked at the pleasure of being held against him.

  “Am I hurting you?” he asked.

  “A little,” she said. “But don’t stop. I want to know what it was like to be her.”

  “Is that why you weave from her perspective?”

  “That’s how I do all my tapestries.”

  “You leave room in the myth for yourself,” he said. “You want to be in the story.”

  “I know that sounds stupid.” She blushed.

  “Not at all. There is no shame in wanting to live inside your favorite stories.”

  “I’m getting too old for fairy tales.”

  “Fairy tales aren’t real. These myths, they did happen,” August insisted. “Andromeda was real. She should be remembered. Always.”

  “You won’t see the Duchess of Cambridge tied to London Bridge to stop the ice caps from melting and flooding London,” Lia said, joking to hide her arousal. “I wish I really could live in Andromeda’s shoes. Well, sandals.”

  “I could put you into her sandals,” August said.

  He released her hands and she tur
ned and faced him.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “We need to talk about the kylix your father gave you tonight. It’s not what you think it is.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Something very, very dangerous.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lia stared at August with narrowed eyes.

  “Dangerous?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I need to see it to be certain.”

  “I don’t know about that. Daddy said you tried to buy it, but he beat you to it. If this is all a ploy to steal it—”

  “I will not steal it. I have no desire to steal it. But I need to know if it’s what I think it is. That’s all. For your sake. I promise.”

  She exhaled heavily. “Fine.”

  Lia took her candle and led him to her bedroom, where she’d put the kylix for safekeeping after dinner. August went to her bedroom fireplace and lit several more candles.

  “Is that Aphrodite?” he asked, staring at the statue on her bedroom fireplace mantel.

  “Oh, yes, it is.” Lia walked over to him. “She was my great-grandfather’s, the thirteenth Earl of Godwick—Old Number Thirteen, we call him. Notorious rake. Loved fine art and even finer sex.”

  “I like the man already,” August said.

  He took the statue by the base and turned it so Aphrodite faced the wall.

  “No offense,” he said, and Lia wasn’t sure if he was speaking to her or Aphrodite. He pointed at a black-and-white photograph that was also on her mantel. “Who’s this?”

  “That’s him—Old Number Thirteen. That photo was taken in 1933 at the Pearl, a brothel in London,” she said. “Lord Malcolm’s favorite haunt.”

  “These women with him are all prostitutes?” he asked. Three glamorous young women in exquisite evening dress sat arrayed around her smiling handsome grandfather.

  “I told you he was notorious,” she said.

  He moved down the mantel to a second photograph.

  “I know these ladies,” August said. “My dinner companions.”

  “Friends of mine. I’ve known Georgy for donkey’s years. She’s from the village of Thornhill, just down the way. I met Rani and Jane at King’s. And that’s me, of course.”